LISA M. BITEL  

Professor of History and Religion

University of Southern California

Director, Monastic Matrix

Director, Interdisciplinary Research Group, Center for Religion and Civic Culture

Selected Honors and Fellowships

• ACLS Fellowship, 2010-11
• Fellow, Center for Excellence in Research, USC, 2008-2011
• Borchard Foundation Conference Grant, 2008-09
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 2000-2001
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, 1994-95
• Irish American Cultural Institute Faculty Fellowship, University College, Galway, 1993

Selected publications

Books:

• Landscape with Two Saints : How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe (Oxford University Press, 2009.)

• Professing Gender, Professing Christianity: co-edited with Felice Lifshitz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.)

• Women in Early Medieval Europe, 300-1100 ( Cambridge University Press, 2002).

• Land of Women : Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland (Cornell University Press, 1996; paperback edition, 1998).

• Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland (Cornell University Press, 1990; paperback edition, 1994; Cork University Press imprint, 1994; History Book Club, 1994).

Recent Articles:

• “Looking the Wrong Way:  Authenticity and Proof of Religious Vision,” with images by Matt Gainer, in Bitel, ed., Visualizing the Invisible: Visionary Technologies in Religious and Cultural Contexts, special double issue of journal Visual Resources (2009.)

• “Professing Religion and Gender in Medieval Europe,” in Bitel and Lifshitz, Gender and Christianity, [above] (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

• “Period Trouble:  The Impossibility of Feminist History,"s in Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz, eds., Paradigms, Methods, and Periodization in Late Ancient and Early Medieval Studies: A Reconsideration (Brill, 2008).

•  “Tools and Scripts for Cursing in Early and Medieval Ireland,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 51/52 (2006/7).

Current projects

• Lady of the Rock: Vision and Religion in the Modern American Desert.
  • Monograph on modern religious vision event in southern California, with photographer Matt Gainer (forthcoming, Cornell University Press.)

• Unseen. 
  • Monograph on vision, sight, and the invisible in premodern Europe.